BIG'S BIG MOVIE LIST

 

I am a student of Psychology. Since an early age, it was what I knew I wanted to do with my life (though the exact field was unclear). One day, I want to own an original antique phrenology skull. I find psychology in culture fascinating, and psychological movies are a definite extension of this. So when my Movie List divining rod landed on “Shutter Island”, I was excited. Aside from my eagerness to see a dark Martin Scorsese thriller and my earnest appreciation for Leo DiCaprio as a leading man, the film is about an island asylum. All of the pieces appeared to be in place for a blockbuster thriller...

 

Our main character, US Marshal Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio), along with his partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), heads to the Ashecliff Mental Hospital for the criminally insane located on the rocky Shutter Island. The two are investigating the mysterious and seemingly impossible disappearance of a female patient, but nothing seems to add up. Escape was nearly impossible, and even if the patient had escaped the building, she surely would have died falling from the rocky bluffs that ring the entire island. On top of this, Teddy is beginning to suspect that a greater conspiracy is brewing on the island, one involving bizarre human experimentation, and perhaps something more sinister.

 

I wish I could tell you that this is a great movie. It's not.

It's technically a good movie. As a psychological period piece its fairly satisfying. Scorsese delivers his directorial prowess, and DiCaprio and Ben Kingsley are expectedly good, but the story just felt hollow, like pieces were missing. A sparse soundtrack of very menacing low strings begins pounding in the first five minutes of the film well before anything remotely menacing occurs. Those same deep bassy strings return periodically, but failed to evoke any feeling in me but annoyance.

 

Going into this movie, I believed that it might have some supernatural or even just dark elements to it. The setting and story had great potential for grim situations and violence (as Scorsese tends to do), but there is an unfortunate lack of anything creepy, malevolent, or otherwise what I was led to believe comprised the contents of this evil island asylum.

Instead of a roaring beast, the story turns out to be a wet mutt that is more about the internal struggles and tepid love story of the protagonist, which I feel are ultimately way less interesting than the story of evil or mayhem that could've been.

 

A lone balding crone of a patient holds up a single “shush” finger to Teddy as he walks onto the grounds in the first act of the film—thats about it for the creep-factor, and even that seemed reserved. I kept waiting for an evil antagonist or spectral force that never came, and perhaps that's my fault, but having seen the trailers I had a completely different expectation for what the tone of the film was supposed to be.

 

I had been given the gist of the final plot reveal long before I had seen this movie, and perhaps going in with the beforehand knowledge of the movie's overarching twist helped to sour my final opinion, but even objectively there are a lot of elements of this movie that hold it back from greatness.